Light enough to read by

Light enough to read by
Fiona Connor, Lucy Skaer, Rachel Shearer and Cathy Livermore

Exhibition preview: Thursday 10 June, 5:30pm
Exhibition runs: 11 June – 25 July 2021
Artist talk with Rachel Shearer: Saturday 12 June, 1pm

Light enough to read by emerged from discussions around the return of The Physics Room’s library into the gallery and to public access. For the last year and a half, since the shift to our current site in the Registry Additions Building, much of the library has sat in boxes. The specific needs of this shift—sufficient and natural light, space for reading, listening, and resting—offered a script for us to work with in the development of this project. Underpinning this was the idea of the exhibition itself as a form of publication, and ‘text’ as something social, material, and lived, subject to conditions of light and weather.

Works by Connor, Skaer, Shearer and Livermore open out from these ideas, transforming the gallery. A metal hare runs, runs, low to the ground, across the wood floor; daylight comes in again and the workshop doorway is open; the gallery breathes like a lung with the names of Waitaha’s winds. Each of these works rely on dynamic relationships: with grammar and syntax, ko ngā hau me ngā wai (winds and waters), architecture and light, positive and negative, chase and flight, oxygen and lungs, reader and listener, fabricator and artist, correspondent and recipient, sequence and rest.

While each relates to narrative, none of the works in Light enough to read by rely on writing itself. A current of questions runs through the exhibition instead. If written words are not the dominant vehicle for information, what other material languages, voices, histories, and relationships can be held in the gallery space? How might the site generate alternative forms of reading, not contingent on words on a page, rather on conditions including light, relationships, oral and material narratives? The works might be received as a series of speculative responses to these questions.

Alongside the exhibition, the library too is recognised as a living form: incomplete, idiosyncratic, implicated in institutional and community politics, responsive to its environment. A library is a physical experience, sometimes, a social one, a space to research, or to rest. It is with these intentions that the gallery’s library space will remain and continue to operate after this exhibition ends.

Light enough to read by is curated by Abby Cunnane, Michelle Wang, and Hamish Petersen.

This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of the Jan Warburton Trust. With thanks also to Ilam School of Fine Arts for their support.

To celebrate the return of our library we have partnered with Infinite Definite to launch three limited edition tote bags. Each tote bag features a quote from past issues of our publication HAMSTER Magazine, by Casey Mazer Larkin Carsel, Jessica Maclean, and Vanessa Crofskey. The totes are designed by Daniel Shaskey and Holly Maitland and printed by Against The Grain Screenprint & Design in an edition of 50.

Tote bags can be purchased from either The Physics Room or Infinite Definite for $35 each.

Image: Microwave/mailbox from the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, shared during research correspondence, 2021. Photo: Lucy Skaer.